Historically, Google is not a litigious company when it comes to patents. The company is now supporting the Prior Art Archive to help patent examiners make better informed decisions on whether to grant an application by making it searchable through Google Patents.

The 2011 purchase of Motorola was mostly a means by Google to get approximately 17,000 patents in order to defend themselves from the numerous lawsuits that were occurring at the time. However, things have significantly quieted down on the legal front and Google is now auctioning some battery-related patents from the purchase.

Google has announced the results of an experimental initiative to buy tech patents and license them at fair rates in order to prevent them falling into the hands of patent trolls. The company revealed that it bought 28% of the “relevant” patents offered to it, paying a median price of around $150k, reports IEEE Spectrum.

Google’s senior product licensing manager Kurt Brasch said that the company was “very, very happy” with the program, with the number of submissions substantially higher than expected… expand full story

In a blog post today, Google announced that its patent search service has added data from four new patent agencies. Starting today, patents from China, Germany, Canada, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) are now aggregated in the Google Patents search database. Most of the patents include artwork, as well as text descriptions, which thanks to Google Translate, are available in a variety of languages.

Last year, we launched two improvements to Google Patents: the Prior Art Finder and European Patent Office (EPO) patents. Today we’re happy to announce the addition of documents from four new patent agencies: China, Germany, Canada, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Many of these documents may provide prior art for future patent applications, and we hope their increased discoverability will improve the quality of patents in the U.S. and worldwide.